David Handler - The Hot Pink Farmhouse

“He’s a garbagehead?”

“They caught him inhaling a computer keyboard cleaner out behind the Science Building last year.”

“What was it, Duster Two?”

“That’s it. He and two other boys. All three of them were suspended.”

“Is there a lot of huffing in this town?”

“You wouldn’t think so, but Dorset isn’t Oz.”

“Even Oz wasn’t Oz,” Des pointed out as they passed through the door into the middle school. “What happened to Ricky’s eye?”

“He gets in a lot of fights.”

“This I can well imagine. Are you sure it didn’t happen in the home?”

Miss Frye puffed out her cheeks. “Trooper, I’m not sure of anything.”

When they arrived at Superintendent Falconer’s outer office, Des encountered a harried, frantic secretary and a short, big-chested woman with bushy hair who was about to explode.

“Okay, what seems to be the problem?” Des asked them calmly.

“The problem is that I have been waiting out here like a piece of garbage for thirty minutes!” the short woman retorted angrily. “The superintendent is supposed to meet with me. Colin is in there. I saw him go in there. I have never encountered such rudeness, such-such-”

“Trooper Mitry, this is Babette Leanse, president of our school board,” Miss Frye said quietly.

“You must be Ben’s mom,” Des said, smiling at her.

“I have an appointment!” she blustered, unswerving in her rage. She was an intensely focused, hard-charging little human blowtorch in a cashmere cardigan sweater and finely tailored wool slacks. Des made her for about forty. Her shock of black hair was streaked with silver. “That man knows I’m out here!”

“I see,” Des said patiently. “And the problem is…?”

“I’ve buzzed him repeatedly,” spoke up Colin’s frazzled secretary, whose desk nameplate identified her as Melanie Zide. She was a dumpy, moon-faced young woman with a pug nose, limp henna hair, eyes that looked sneaky behind clunky black-framed glasses. “I called out his name. I knocked. H-He just won’t answer. And his door is locked from the inside and I don’t have a key. I’ve got the custodian searching for one, but…”

Des jiggled the knob. It was locked all right. “Is there a window in there?”

“There is,” Melanie said, chewing nervously on the inside of her mouth. “But it has security bars over it. And his venetian blinds are closed. You can’t see anything.”

Des tried rapping on the door. “Superintendent Falconer!? Colin!?” Then she put a shoulder to it. It didn’t give. The frame was solid. There was a transom over it, of frosted glass. She pulled a sturdy chair over in front of the door and climbed up on it, placing her at eye level with the transom. She tried to pry it open with her pocket knife, only it was latched shut from the inside. She pursed her lips, frowning. “You’re sure he’s in there?”

“Positive,” said Babette Leanse.

“For at least a half hour,” Melanie added, her voice strained.

Des asked the others to get away from the door and used the butt end of her Sig on the frosted glass, smashing a jagged hole that she could see through.

What she saw was Colin Falconer slumped face-down at his desk, unconscious. On the desk, next to his left hand, there was an empty prescription pill bottle.

“Call nine-one-one,” she ordered Melanie Zide sharply. “Tell them we need EMS now. We’ve got a possible overdose.”

Miss Frye let out a gasp as Melanie lunged for the phone.

Babette Leanse just stood there with her mouth open, speechless.

The custodian still could not find a key to the superintendent’s door. Des asked him for a pry bar instead. He returned with a foot-long crowbar that she applied to the lock while he threw his weight against the door. The frame gave with a sharp crack and they went in, the broken transom glass crunching underfoot.

Colin was breathing. His respiration was shallow, his pulse rapid, skin pale and cool. “He’s in shock,” Des said, checking the pill bottle. It was diazepam, the generic name for Valium. The bottle, if full, would have held fifty tablets, ten milligrams each. “We’ll need blankets.”

The custodian ran to get some from the nurse’s office.

“Colin, you fool,” Miss Frye said from the doorway, her voice heavy with sadness. “You stupid, stupid fool.”

The ambulance got there in less than five minutes, pulling right up onto the playground next to the building, its siren silent so as not to alarm the children. Margie and Mary Jewett, who headed Dorset’s volunteer ambulance corps, were no-nonsense sisters in their late fifties. Des had already encountered them at a couple of fender benders and found them to be well-trained and unflappable.

Margie checked Colin Falconer’s blood pressure while Mary hooked him up to a cardiac monitor, the two of them barking shorthand at each other. They did the Roto-Rooter thing on his stomach, then gave him oxygen and administered two hundred milliliters of saline solution through a large-bore intravenous catheter while they continued to monitor his vital signs. He was now semiconscious, murmuring incoherently under his breath.

“He’s still a bit shocky,” Margie told Des. “But he’s healthy and strong and it’s pretty hard to kill yourself on Valium.”

“Unless you’re blind drunk to boot,” Mary added.

When they had him stabilized Margie wheeled in the stretcher and they loaded him onto it. “Let’s move!” she called out.

“Moving!” Mary affirmed.

And they hustled Colin Falconer out the door and off to the Middlesex Clinic in Essex, leaving Des to notify his next of kin.

“I guess that would be his wife, Greta,” Melanie Zide spoke up. “She should be at the gallery by now.”

Des thanked Melanie for the information, and Miss Frye for her help. The young teacher smiled at her tightly before she returned to her classroom, leaving Des with Babette Leanse. And the distinct impression that Dorset’s school superintendent had tried to take his own life rather than face this woman.

“Mrs. Leanse, exactly what was this meeting between you two about?”

“Trooper, this is hardly the time to discuss it,” Babette answered sharply, managing to look down her nose at Des even though Des towered over her by perhaps a foot. This was a woman who was trying very hard to command respect. If there was one thing Des had learned at West Point, it was this: The ones who had to work at it were seldom the ones who received it.

“So when would be a good time?” Des asked her, as Melanie watched the two of them intently from behind her desk.

“I suppose you could swing by my house this afternoon,” Babette allowed. “But I don’t understand why you’re pressing me on this.”

“Because my job is to see that things like this don’t happen. That’s rule number one in the resident trooper’s unofficial handbook.”

“And is there a rule number two?” Babette demanded.

“Oh, absolutely,” Des said, smiling at her broadly. “Rule number two is to make absolutely sure that they don’t ever happen again.”

The Patterson Gallery was located right down Dorset Street from the old Gill House, home to the Dorset Academy of Fine Arts. The gallery was in a bright-yellow converted barn that had previously been a grain-and-feed store. The gnarly oak tree out front had a red ribbon tied around it, indicating where Colin Falconer’s wife stood on the school-bond issue. Whatever was wrong between the two of them, Des reflected, it wasn’t local politics.

Inside, Des found a clean, brightly lit space with sparkling white walls and polished fir floors. A fire crackled in the fireplace. Downstairs, the gallery featured an array of luminous early-twentieth-century landscape paintings from noteworthy shoreline impressionists such as Childe Hassam, Henry Ward Ranger, Carleton Wiggins and Elbert Frye, Wendell’s grandfather. Prices ranged anywhere between one and five times what Des took home in a year. On the second floor Greta Patterson offered more modestly priced works by contemporary artists, many of them recent graduates of the Dorset Academy. She served on its board, as had her father and grandfather, who had operated the Patterson Gallery before her.